Gardiner city councilors and residents on Wednesday will review a proposed budget with a reduced 2.4 percent tax hike, but some councilors are pushing for a smaller increase or no tax increase.

The public hearing Wednesday is the first time residents will be formally asked to weigh in on the proposed city budget that will raise taxes by $50 for every $100,000 of assessed value if councilors approve the budget.

It will also be the first time councilors see the revised budget after requesting City Manager Scott Morelli at their last meeting to make additional cuts to his proposed $5.48 million budget to drop the tax increase from 3.4 percent to 2.4 percent, equal to the tax increase in the approved school budget.

The council meeting is scheduled for 6 p.m. Wednesday at City Hall.

In order to go from a 3.4 percent tax increase to 2.4 percent, Morelli will present a budget with about $70,000 in cuts, a little more than half of which is from delaying the hires of a children’s librarian and police officer. With the cuts, the proposed city budget is down 0.7 percent from the current budget.

Delaying the hires would hurt both departments, leading to more overtime by police and the closing of the children’s room in the Gardiner Public Library on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, Morelli wrote in his memo to councilors Friday.

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“This may well be the last year we can find cuts that do not have a more significant impact on the level of services we provide,” he wrote.

Councilors at their last meeting June 17 were split over whether to ask Morelli to come back with a larger cut to his proposed budget and whether he should include cuts to nonprofit organizations.

The city’s annual donations to nonprofits, particularly the more than $100,000 given to the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Gardiner, Gardiner Main Street and Johnson Hall Performing Arts, have been criticized by some residents in previous budget discussions. Councilor Maureen Blanchard grilled the leaders of the nonprofit organizations at a meeting last month, asking why they need money from the city and questioning details of their operations.

But supporters of funding the organizations say the city gets more than their money’s worth with the donations.

Mayor Thomas Harnett said the Boys & Girls Club leverages the little more than $50,000 it receives from the city to get hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal and state funding and serves as the city’s de facto youth program. The events hosted annually by Gardiner Main Street and Johnson Hall bring people to the city to eat, shop and discover what the city has to offer, he said.

“I would be devastated if we would cut a program like that or eliminate funding to a program like that, because I think it would go against everything we are trying to accomplish,” Harnett said.

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Last year, in Morelli’s second budget proposed to councilors, he recommended cutting 5 percent from the Boys & Girls Club, Gardiner Main Street and Johnson Hall and Chrysalis Place food pantry, but the councilors restored the funding in their approved budget.

At the June 17 meeting, councilors voted 5-3 to direct Morelli to present a revised budget with a 2.4 percent tax increase without cutting funding for nonprofit organizations or paving. The three councilors who voted against the motion, Maureen Blanchard, Terry Berry and Philip Hart, said they would have liked to have seen the nonprofit funding on the table as an option for Morelli, but others who approved the motion said they saw cuts to nonprofits as a policy decision for councilors to make.

Councilors can still vote to cut the funding when they approve a budget, but the budget going to the public hearing Wednesday will include the full funding. The meeting Wednesday will serve as the first of two public readings the council must hold before approving the budget.

Berry, who represents District 1 covering most of the area northwest of Cobbossee Stream, said he would have preferred to not restrict what Morelli could suggest cutting. Berry also proposed trying to get the budget down to around a 2 percent tax increase, saying it would be easier to add funding back into the budget than make additional cuts to the proposed budget.

Hart, who represents the majority of the southern half of the city in District 4, also said he wants to consider reducing funding to nonprofit organizations if city departments are facing cuts. He said he thinks the city’s tax rate — $20.60 per $1,000 of assessed value — is too high, but he said he also understands that the city has to pay for the services it provides the residents.

“Nobody’s more conservative than I am, and I honestly believe there’s no fat in that budget to be cut,” Hart said.

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Blanchard, elected as an at-large councilor in November, is the most vocally opposed to the city donating to nonprofit organizations. She doesn’t want the city to give anything to nonprofit organizations, but if it does, she thinks the organizations should be scrutinized more heavily by council using some type of formula.

“I think the Boys & Girls Club does a great job. I think Johnson Hall does a good job,” she said. “But I also think the taxpayers need a break, and if it’s going to be cuts through departments, it should be cuts through donations.”

Paul Koenig — 621-5663

pkoenig@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @pdkoenig


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